Trying to install rawhide: madness and where do we hope to go ?

[Matthias Saou]

Daniel Veillard wrote :

>   I would like to debug the inotify problem found on head, try to add 
> V4L2 support for pwlib and work on Xen setup. For this I need a Rawhide
> install, this sounds simple and resinstalling a rawhide used to be a copy
> of the image boot to an USB key, use quickstart to point to a local
> mirror and in 20 mn have a new setup ready to work on. I really didn't
> expected to face the following mess:
> 
>   First trying the installer, I have a local copy of the rawhide mirror,
> any attempt to bout from the boot image results in anaconda failing
> not able to import os or sys at the python level, i.e. not the kind of
> bug you can work around by yourself if you're not intimate with anaconda:
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Running anaconda, the Fedora Core system installer - please wait
> Could not find platform independant libraries <prefix>
> Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
> 'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
> Traceback (most recent call last)
>   File "/usr/bin/anaconda", line 28, in ?
>     import sys, os
> ImportError: no module named os
> installer exited abnormally
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>   it had been that way for months, general feedback is installer does
> not work, and that the expected way is to upgrade from a FC4 setup.
>   So okay it's takes way more time but I reinstall a FC4 partition from
> scratch, then modify the yum.conf to point to my local rawhide repository.
> I upgrade yum, I upgrade the kernel and one hours and a half later I try
> to reboot. Dies as all init level respawns too fast. 2.6.13-1.1538_FC5 won't
> boot but the old 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 still allows to boot.
>   So okay one may need to update everything yum update launched....
> Which means a transaction with 510 packages and 881 megabytes of data which 
> are downloaded *first* onto the local disk before even starting to test the
> transaction. 15 mn later I'm greeted with:
>   ('installing package openoffice.org-writer-1.9.127-1.2.0.fc5 needs 764MB on the / filesystem', (9, '/', 800161792L))
> 
>   Of course downloading all packages locally, plus keeping them for the
> entire transaction, plus the conservative (good) rpm checks for disk space
> means one need 2 Gigabyte free on the partition (and this is far far from
> a full install) to just run the upgrade.
> 
>   So removing a bunch of beefy packages, I regain enough space on the partition
> to get the transaction to start. 954 packages to be updated/cleaned, the
> transaction took 35 minutes.
> 
>   Then reboot ... 2.6.13-1.1538_FC5 still fails to boot all process forked
> by init just seems to crash, but booting the old 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 works.
> Half a day later I still don't have a setup to test inotify or recent Xen.

Current Rawhide kernels are broken. See Dave's earlier email to the list :

On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 09:51:03AM +1000, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
 > On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 12:04 -0400, Build System wrote:
 > 
 > > kernel-2.6.13-1.1538_FC5
 > > ------------------------
 > > * Mon Sep 05 2005 Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com>
 > > - 2.6.13-git5
 > 
 > Just a heads up.  This is still doing the respawn problem.
 > 
 
Try 1542 from http://people.redhat.com/davej/kernels/Fedora/devel/
That's tomorrows rawhide kernel.

		Dave

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